Names are like colors and shapes, and their new one doesn't really indicate that they're innovators. Zeit was cool because german names in tech are quite rare, it was showing that they did things differently. Vercel sounds like a lame web 1.0 thing, it's more rigid, rolls way harder off the tongue.

Focusing on backend servers or not is just a implementation detail as a hosting company that want's you to not care about the underlying tech, the name itself is way more important at their size.